Surrogate Self Research Articles

The Seven Selves of Dementia.

The self is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon, encompassing a variety of cognitive processes and psychosocial influences. Considering this, there is a multiplicity of “selves,” the current review suggesting that seven fundamental self-processes can be identified that further our understanding of the experience of dementia. These include (1) an embodied self, manifest as corporeal awareness; (2) an agentic self, related to being an agent and influencing life circumstances; (3) an implicit self, linked to non-conscious self-processing; (4) a critical self, which defines the core of self-identity; (5) a surrogate self, based on third-person perspective information; (6) an extended self, including external objects or existences that are incorporated into the self; and, finally, (7) an emergent self, a property of the self-processes that give rise to the sense of a unified self. These are discussed in relation to self-awareness and their use in making sense of the experience of dementia.

Interoceptive Dramaturgies of ‘Surrogate-selves’ in Performative VR Experiences

Through a close analysis of interoceptive dramaturgies, and by drawing on neuroscientific and cognitive definitions of interoception, this article will explore what is at stake in employing interoceptive oriented design in performative virtual reality (VR) environments and the ethical implications of manipulating corporeal experiences through these perceptual modalities. I examine two contrasting performative VR experiences: a one-to-one interactive virtual reality performance—Goodnight, Sleep Tight (2017) by ZU-UK—and Half-Life Alyx (2020)—a VR game by Valve. The first case study is part one-to-one performance and 360-degree VR video inviting the participant to experience a dream through the eyes of a child. It is a gentle, poetic and subtly constructed VR experience that draws the participant into the world of childhood memories. The second case study is a survival horror videogame set in a three-dimensional (3D) VR environment replete with violence, gore and invasive interactivity. Despite the contrasts between the two case studies I contend, following Liam Jarvis’s (2019) insight, that in both cases players/participants are construed and perform as ‘surrogate selves’ of their respective avatars. I also argue that their experiences are to a great extent conditioned through interoceptive aesthetics.

The Idiot as Artist:The Fantasy Boats of James Henry Pullen

The Idiot as Artist:The Fantasy Boats of James Henry Pullen

The Eolian Harp: Coleridge’s Middle Voice?

Abstract Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s conversation poem, The Eolian Harp, configures a complex and highly significant relationship between activity and passivity. A merely passive poet, under the influence of natural or divine inspiration, would in Coleridge’s view be reduced to a mere automaton. Yet the poem is often thought to represent just such a poet. Similarly, it is thought to represent Sara, the speaker’s interlocutor, as a surrogate self. I shall argue, instead, that the poem presents the self in a ‘middle voice’, at once active and passive, such that inspiration does not efface human agency. I shall also consider the senses in which Sara evinces a middle voice and thus a distinct and substantial subjectivity. The implications of this argument for Coleridge’s broader corpus, and for some recent critiques of his aesthetics, will be suggested.

Power of Human-self (Transfer, Transform and Transcending the Ego)

The article cocerns the development of human-self which forms the human personality. The feeling of having a personal identity is known as the ego. Ego cannot be seen as the physical body is, though there are many selves or surrogate selves operating in the same person This is developed right from childhood till matured man in four stages: physical body, intellect, morality and finally spirituality. Vedanta recognizes two dimensions of self: the ego or the lower self and the higher or transcendent inner self. This is elaborated and finally the method of yoga has been discussed.

Migration as Foundation: Hagar, the ‘Resident Alien’, as Euro-America’s Surrogate Self *

AbstractIn this paper I use Hagar as a type of the shifting modern figure of the migrant, refugee or ‘resident alien’ inside the national family. In a modern update of the productively anachronistic typologies attempted by the Church Fathers, I use the presence of the Egyptian slave in biblical-European foundations to trouble the unstable concept of Europe/Christendom founded on a (distant) Christian heritage. I also use what I’m calling the ‘Hagaramic’ to disturb bland invocations of the ‘Abrahamic’ on the contemporary political stage. What happens when we replace the spiritualised, fraternal/paternal figure of the Abrahamic with the Hagaramic: the immigrant mimic of the Abrahamic; the resident female Egyptian alien who is there before, and supports and enables, the ‘true’ family? How does my attempt to use this figure relate to earlier attempts (by thinkers like Sigmund Freud or Edward Said) to draw on strange old biblical figures to force European identities outside themselves?

Exile and the City F. Scott Fitzgerald's “The Lost Decade”

Exile and the City F. Scott Fitzgerald's “The Lost Decade”

Surrogate selves: notes on anti-trafficking and anti-blackness

This essay explores the discursive production of black captivity across the African diaspora in the afterlife of slavery. I take as my objects of analysis the contemporary anti-trafficking and anti-slavery movements, features of the increasing hegemony of human rights discourse for formulating problems of social justice and their remedies. I argue that configuring black captivity – in this case, the experiences of Nigerian women migrants to Western Europe – through these hegemonic discourses extend, rather than ameliorate, the global structural antagonism of anti-blackness.

Birthing a mother: the surrogate body and the pregnant self

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Prologue: Yael Introduction Part One: Dividing 1. Surrogate Selves and Embodied Others 2. The Body Map 3. Operationalizing the Body Map Part Two: Connecting 4. Intended Mothers and Maternal Intentions 5. The Shifting Body Part Three: Separating 6. Rites of Classification 7. The Surrogate's Gift Part Four: Redefining 8. The Surrogate's Mission 9. The Hero's Quest Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

Callin’ out around the world: Isaac Julien's new ethnicities

This essay addresses the role of African American culture in the work of filmmaker and installation artist Isaac Julien. Focusing on the films Looking for Langston: A Meditation on Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance (1989) and Baadasssss Cinema: A Bold Look at 70s Blaxploitation Films (2002) and the installation Baltimore (2003), I look at the ways that Julien's excavation of African American texts and traditions underwrites his eclectic auto/biographical – auto-ethnographic, auto-genealogical – project. First, I discuss the representation of Langston Hughes and the recovery of the interracial queer eroticism of the Harlem Renaissance in Looking for Langston. Next, I examine the treatment in Baadassss Cinema and Baltimore of 1970s blaxploitation cinema as a genre that resists the sanctioned versions of African American history and culture canonized in the Civil Rights movement, on the one hand, and Baltimore's Great Blacks in Wax Museum, on the other. Throughout, I suggest, Julien finds in the lives and work of African American writers and artists a prefiguration of his own enterprise. Yet, rejecting confinement in restrictive notions of race, nationality, and sexuality, Julien represents not only African Americans such as Hughes, but also Robert Mapplethorpe, Quentin Tarantino, and the Italian Renaissance painter Fra Carnevale, among others, as symbolic parents and surrogate selves. Refashioning the work of his precursors, I argue, Julien elucidates – and queers – what Stuart Hall identifies as “new ethnicities” and fashions himself as a cosmopolitan, diasporic, postimperial British subject.

Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity (review)

Reviewed by: Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity Stuart Burrows (bio) Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity, by Leland S. Person; pp. vii + 206. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003, $38.50. Henry James's place in the roughhouse of twentieth-century American fiction has always been somewhat uncertain, his rococo style and claustrophobic psychological realism at odds with the stylistic swagger of Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. Indeed, as early as 1907 critic H. G. Dwight declared James a "woman's writer," who "no man was able to read." Leland Person's new book reads such crass judgments literally, as it were, in order to map the ways in which "James illustrates the ambiguities and confusions—the multivalence—of gender and sexuality" (7). "Repeatedly," Person asserts, "James demonstrates the instability of gender identities" (7). In contrast, the argument of Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity is itself remarkably constant, namely that "James delights in positioning his male characters in such ways that their gender and sexual orientations are reversed, ambiguous, and even multiple" (14). [End Page 530] Person's analysis follows in the footsteps of the work of Eve Sedgwick, Michael Moon, and Hugh Stevens, critics who have overturned traditional understandings of James as somehow "lacking" in masculinity. Such analyses, Person suggests, depend upon "a notion of normative male identity from which James...can only deviate" (6). Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity uses Kaja Silverman's psychoanalytic approach to James as its primary analytical model, though Person rightly criticizes the limitations of any model which "does not account for the playfulness and slipperiness—the verbal performance—of James's language" (6). He is to be applauded for his attention to Jamesian form, although the cost of such close reading is occasionally evident. Aside from a brief tour of a few of the many writers who directly confronted the question of masculinity in the 1890s, Person is unwilling to engage with the fascinating historical background to James's exploration of masculinity. The one moment Person does venture outside the text, in an analysis of the ways James's complex critical engagement with the work of George Sand shaped his late novels, the result is highly illuminating. Sand's flamboyant persona—she regularly impersonated a man, and was often mistaken for one—offered a template, Person suggests, for James's exploration of the compositional possibilities offered by "suspending" his principal characters "between genders, neither masculine nor feminine" (4). Sand forced James "to disassociate 'masculine' from 'male' and thus from himself—in other words, to interrogate a monolithic masculinity and to accept the possibility of a plurality of masculinities from which he might continually improvise his own" (4). These are the very lessons, Person suggests, which the hero of The Ambassadors (1903), Lambert Strether, learns from Madame de Vionnet, lessons such as the "art of taking things as they came." Strether experiences the same transformation that Madame de Vionnet has already produced in Chad Newsome, that "miracle almost monstrous" which, according to Person's reading, echoes the "monstrous vitality" James found so irresistible in Sand. Such a claim allows Person to depart from negative readings of Strether's famous renunciation and instead find his determination "not, out of the whole affair, to have got anything for myself" liberatory rather than pitiable, in that Strether thus evades the grasp of society's compulsive heterosexuality. Such an evasion represents James's paradoxical attempt to render in fiction his admiration for Sand's success at "making acquaintance with life at first hand" (qtd. in Person 25). The most impressive reading in the volume, however, is that of The Portrait of a Lady (1881). Person tracks James's repeated use of the term "gentleman" to describe all the major characters of the novel, including, of course, Gilbert Osmond, and links this to contemporary interest in defining the term (though once again the historical context is examined too briefly). Ralph's famous consumption is wittily linked to what Person calls his "consumptive" relations with those around him, and Ralph's use of Isabel as a surrogate self is read as an example of cross-dressing, a sign that the young Mr. Touchett...

Charlie Loke: Contributions from Tennis Court Road—Past, Present and Future

0143–4004/03/$-see front matter and almost every volume of Trophoblast Research has contained his reviews. Yung Wai Loke (known to everyone as Charlie) was born in Penang, an island off the West Coast of Malaysia. His family fled to Singapore at the time of the Japanese invasion and he remembers the dog fights overhead before Singapore was captured in 1941. The remainder of the war was spent under the Japanese occupation in Kuala Lumpur living on a diet of brown rice. After the war he was despatched to England, a journey taking three days by air, and was educated at the Leys School and then King’s College in Cambridge. He then moved to St Thomas’s Hospital and qualified as a doctor in 1960 but, after spending a year as a houseman, he left England to return to Malaya where he worked as a Pathologist. It was there that his life was influenced in two important ways; he reduced his golf handicap to four and developed an interest in hydatidiform moles and choriocarcinomas, both common tumours in the Far East. There were strong pulls to settle permanently in Malaya and join the family business (his grandfather had emigrated from Southern China and founded the tin and rubber industries in Malaya), but in 1967 Charlie felt he should return to Cambridge. He was appointed as a Demonstrator in the Department of Pathology where he stayed for the next 35 years. In one of his earliest publications, arising from work performed in Malaya, he counted Barr bodies in placental tumours and found they were all XX in chromosome constitution and inferred (naively as it now turns out) that female placentae are more prone to the development of trophoblast tumours than males (Loke, 1969). Charlie’s long interest in trophoblast had begun. He became fascinated by how the allogeneic nature of choriocarcinomas might influence their behaviour (Loke, 1975) and the extension of this question to the normal placenta became his main intellectual preoccupation. Is the placenta discerned by the mother as self, nonself, missing self or surrogate self? How does this happen? Trophoblast cells are extraembryonic, arising from trophectoderm as the first differentiated cell of the embryo. The placenta is neither mother nor fetus, but provides an interface, a crucial intermediary, a no man’s land between these two genetically different individuals. There is an analogy with this concept in Charlie himself, buffered between England and Malaysia yet a To whom correspondence should be addressed at: Department of Pathology, University of Cambridge, Tennis Court Road, Cambridge CB2 1QP, UK. Tel.: 44 1223 333727; Fax: 44 1223 765065; E-mail: am485@cam.ac.uk Figure 1. Charlie Loke, Melbourne, Australia, October 2002.

Fore Narratives Through Time

Fore stories about bush spirits provide versions of historical experience not offered in everyday conversation. The main actor begins his adventures as a forestdwelling, capricious agemate who intrudes into village space where his activities are less benign. Moving closer to colonial settlements and now described as a wild man, he robs a tradestore, steals from a government office, and is exiled to Australia. With Papua New Guinea Independence, he reemerges as a unifying figure for the Eastern Highlands, appearing on the provincial flag, in public monuments, and in the productions of a new national theatre. At the same time, this beloved trickster of yesteryear continues to live in the South Fore, though in hiding. His public place is now occupied by a tiny garden thief who consumes cash crops and no longer speaks. The changing shape and behaviour of these beings, surrogate selves, address broad processes of political and economic transformation, as well as the contradictions of precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial times.

MtLOH (mitochondrial loss of heteroplasmy), aging, and ‘surrogate self’

In tribute to Dr Strehler, an attempt is made to use a style of reasoning found in some of his later papers as an outline of this article. First, general arguments in favor of the involvement of somatic mutations in mtDNA in the aging process are presented. Second, evidence is provided in support of a general tendency of mitochondrial genomes to reach homoplasmic state at the cellular level, for which we propose the term mitochondrial loss of heteroplasmy (mtLOH). This process is likely to facilitate the involvement of mtDNA mutations in the aging process by streamlining the phenotypic expression of the mutant genotype. Third, preliminary evidence of the very high incidence of clonal deletions in pigmented neurons of substantia nigra is reported. This observation highlights the possibility that accumulation of mtDNA mutations specific in certain cell types of a complex tissue may account for the involvement of mtDNA mutations in the aging process despite the relatively low average incidence of these mutations in the tissue as a whole. High incidence of mtDNA deletions in pigmented neurons evokes Strehler's idea that efforts to delay aging may not be the most cost-efficient way of preserving ‘self awareness and a joyful sense of life’, as he put it. A potential alternative suggested by Strehler, i.e. creation of a ‘surrogate self’ by computer simulation may deserve more attention than it currently enjoys.

Surrogate Selves: The "Rolin Madonna" and the Late-Medieval Devotional Portrait

Surrogate Selves: The "Rolin Madonna" and the Late-Medieval Devotional Portrait

The Art of Self

140Fourth Genre task: to both open and close the sky, to depict the self, living its closed-up story, but also to step back and describe the larger picture, to push beyond the facts ofdaily existence and reveal the truth that was not perceived as the life was lived. VirginiaWoolfdescribes the challenge ofthis aspect ofmemoir in"A Sketch ofthe Past" when she writes offeeling like a fish in a stream but being unable to describe the stream. This is territory that memoir shares with fiction. What are these books but studies of character, the forces that shape character, the ways in which people are determined by—and capable of rising above—the places in which they are reared? As Coetzee writes when considering growing up amidst the horrific repression and violence of his community near Cape Town: "Whoever he truly is, whoever the true T is that ought to be rising out ofthe ashes ofhis childhood, is not being allowed to be born, is being kept puny and stunted." Both fiction and memoir have long recorded the struggle ofthe "I" to rise out ofthe ashes ofthe past, to overcome forces of repression. The Art of Self Steven Harvev On a flight recently I met a fiction writer. Both ofus were on our way to a writer's conference in Portland Oregon, and when I told her that I wrote personal essays she laughed. "Oh, I love the form," she said. "It's so easy." I heard the ice in our drinks rattle in the silence that ensued. I had plenty of time, before we landed, to think about what she had said. Confusion about the essay begins with a misconception: that art must be invented. To be creative—the argument goes—literature must be made up. Since the personal essay begins with a real life, it is less creative, less artistic, than fiction. Such a view, I think, is mistaken, based not only on confusions about writing, but on confusions about art as well. What makes writing— writing ofany kind—an art is not invention, but shape. Shapeliness. The facts, the events, the invented flights of fancy do not make up a work of art. The shapeliness of the author's composition takes us to that level. The urge to shape begins in loss. All ofus are losers, of course, because we are human, but artists console themselves, redeem losses, with their creations . John Logan has written that the baby, weaned from its mother's breast, begins moving its mouth as if to shape words, language beginning Roundtable: Literal versus Invented Truth in Memoir141 with the first loss. For the writer, these mouthings never stop. Understood this way, art does not begin with ego, but with feelings ofself-annihilation, the artist creating a surrogate self. So, the potter shapes a pot. The painter catches a scene. The musician holds note. And the essayist fashions a text. "My advice to memoir writers," Annie Dillard writes, "is to embark upon a memoir for the same reason you would embark on any book: to fashion a text." The result is that the text—even iftaken from the writer's life—has a life ofits own, separate from the author. "After I've written about my experiences," Dillard adds, "my memories are gone; they've been replaced by the work. The work is a sort of changeling on the doorstep." Only the text, shed ofourselves and hammered into shape, can redeem us. The enemy of the text, then, is what happened, and this is true whether the work is fictional or not. What happened may matter to us, but it is lost on us if we do not transform it into art. Writers fashion a text, giving shape to our joys and fears, by making choices on the page. Choice—not invention or reportage—gives direction and purpose to a work ofliterature and there are certainly many choices to be made: When to begin? When to end? Do I fess up or lie? Should I use a pencil or a computer, yellow legal pad or typing paper? Tb drink or not to drink—and when! In the course of sifting through these and a...

Double and Other: C.F. Meyer's Der Heilige

In his seminal book Orientalism, Edward Said traces the evolution of that phenomenon as an academic discourse that places the Orient under the sign of an exotic but fundamentally negative alterity. This psychic distancing from the Orient is performed in order to pave the way for its colonialization by the West. Said affirms that the Orient has almost always been for Europe one of its deepest and most recurring images of the (Said 1). Just two pages later, he states his book tries to show that European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self' (Said 3). Though both these asse rtions are consistent in indicating Europe's projection of itself as radically different from the Orient, the image of the Orient as surrogate self to Europe seems to contradict the hypothesis that the Orient served as a primary source for European visions of the Other. Said's statements are not so much self-contradicting as they are illustrative of the deep-seated entanglement binding the motifs of the Double and the Other in colonialist discourse on the Orient, particularly in the French and English literary he discusses in his book. Of course, this entanglement is not restricted to literature dealing at some level with the Near, Middle, or Far East, those regions that (along with Africa) were most intensely subjected to English and French colonization in the nineteenth century. Paul Coates has asserted that works of fiction exist in a space between the Double and the Other. To enter into a work of fiction is in a sense to transform the Other into a Double: to discover in the apparent foreignness of another person the lineaments of one's own aspirations and hopes (Coates 1), and this judgement seems reasonably sound. Nevertheless, Said's book shows us how the insertion of the Orient into this space encompassing the existence of literary fiction can be elucidated to characterize not just the consciousness of certain individual writers, but to reveal how an entire continent created, in some measure, its own self-image by creating protagonists who evolve highly ambiguous identities. European ambitions and ideals are transposed onto colonial subjects in such literature, while Western

Contributions to Psychohistory: XII. the View from Betwixt and Between: J. M. Barrie and Humankind

In the world of betwixt and between nothing is ever so firmly fixed that it may not desert its proper post in space and time. From the far side of manhood, where the way opens into boyhood again, Barrie evolved ideas of considerable psychological value. General constructions, such as the lost middle act of life, the surrogate self, and the unlikely second chance, counsel courage to control the innate enemy, human frailty. Courage is “the lovely virtue.” The entrancing life has self-mastery for its goal. “Go out and fight,” he argues.

The Surrogate Self

The Surrogate Self